On Sunday afternoon my brother Jonas rang the bell of the mother of my husband, with a bottle of German riesling in one hand and a bouquet of yellow tulips in the other. He had flown in from Hamburg four days earlier and was still half on European time, wearing a jacket that was far too light for Knoxville in November. When Gloria opened the door and saw him standing on her porch, the man from the envelope, her mouth fell open and the dish towel slid out of her hand.
“Mom,” said my husband Ben, from just behind me, in a voice that was almost kind, “I would like you to meet Jonas Weber. He is the brother of Lena. He was born in Frankfurt and now lives in Hamburg, where he teaches high school physics. He has been visiting for a week. He is the man who was hugging my wife in the parking lot.” Gloria looked at Jonas. She looked at me. Her face went through three colors in about four seconds, and she took hold of the door frame so tightly her knuckles turned white.
“That is not possible,” she said. “The man at the investigator told me.” Ben reached into his jacket pocket and took out a folded sheet of paper. “I called him on Friday, Mom,” he said. “His name is Mr. Pruitt. He is honest, which was a surprise. He told me that three days into the job, he looked up the tag on the rental car, found Jonas at the airport records, and realized he was the brother of Lena. He emailed you that same afternoon. Would you like me to read you what you wrote back?” She said nothing. He read it aloud.
Fear of losing someone can make us act like a thief; the cure is being asked, kindly and plainly, what we are really afraid of.
“Continue surveillance. A brother would say that. Find the hotel.” Ben folded the paper again. “You had the answer in your hand on the ninth of October,” he said, “and you kept paying four thousand dollars for a lie. I do not know whether you wanted it to be true or whether you could not stop. But I know that you sent a man to follow my wife for a month, and that you put a photograph of a hug between me and the person I love most.” Nobody on that porch spoke. A leaf blew across the planks.
Gloria began to cry. It was a small, bewildered cry, nothing like the dramatic scenes I had learned to brace for. She turned to Jonas, and said, in a voice that I would never have imagined from her, “I am so sorry. I do not even know your name. I have been following you for a month, and I did not know your name.” Jonas set the flowers on the porch rail. He is a calm man, my brother, the kind who has spent his life explaining to fifteen year olds that the universe is not out to get them.
“Mrs. Hendricks,” he said, “I am not angry. I came a long way to meet the family of my sister, and I had a very good week. But I would like to ask you something.” He met her eyes. “What did you think you would find?” It was the question that no one else had been willing to ask. Gloria stood there with her hands twisted in her apron. For a long moment I thought she would not answer. Then she whispered, “That someone would take him away from me.”
We went inside. Nobody could think what else to do. The table was already set for four, with the good china and a pot roast in the oven, because she had planned a dinner of triumph, and no one had the heart to waste it. We sat down. The pot roast was excellent, and no one said so. Halfway through the meal, Ben set down his fork and told her gently that she was his mother, that he had loved her all his life, and that the thing she feared was the very thing she was causing.
“I am not going anywhere, Mom,” he said. “But I will not be handed envelopes. If you are afraid, tell me. If you are angry at Lena, tell her to her face. And Mr. Pruitt is going to refund the final invoice, because I asked him to, and because he agreed with me.” She nodded, wiping her eyes with her napkin. She asked Jonas if he played cards, and he said he knew a game called Skat that took three hours to explain. She said she had three hours. They stayed at the table until midnight.
I wish I could say everything was changed overnight. It was not. Gloria went to see a counselor in the new year, which Ben had asked her to do, and she cried in the car on the way home from the first appointment and told me, in a rare confidence, that no one had ever asked her about the death of her husband. I did not know what to say, so I held her hand across the console. We have since learned that it is easier to sit beside her than to argue.
In April, Jonas sent a package from Hamburg. Inside was a deck of Skat cards with a hand written note: “For the lady who always keeps score.” There was also a small tin of cookies, which she opened at the table with a delighted gasp. She wrote him a letter of thanks that ran to six pages, and he wrote back. They have been trading letters ever since, one a month, an old woman in Tennessee and a physics teacher in Germany who share a deck of cards and a bad habit of writing in the margins.
This summer, my husband and I went to her house for the Fourth of July. At the end of the evening, as the fireworks went up over the Tennessee River, she pressed something small into my palm. It was a house key, and a note that read: “Come anytime. I will not watch the street.” I laughed, and I hugged her, and she let me, which she does not always. The gray sedan has never come back. I look for it now, out of habit, and I smile when it is not there.